


After the Ashes

by The_Buzz



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Not Really Character Death, Post-Endgame, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-05
Updated: 2019-05-05
Packaged: 2020-02-26 14:54:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18719329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Buzz/pseuds/The_Buzz
Summary: Matt turned to dust along with half the world. Foggy did his best to move on. He helped people. He got married (not that it's going so well).He never really thought Matt would come back, until he did.





	After the Ashes

**Author's Note:**

> This story is inspired by that one guy in the support group with Cap who looked way too much like Foggy. 
> 
> You can find me and my many thoughts about Matt and Foggy on tumblr as avocadosat-law. :)
> 
> Enjoy!

Foggy twisted the wedding ring on his finger, back and forth a few times, then sighed and started to work it off over his knuckle.

He'd tried. _They_ had tried. In a world that had, in a second flat turned into an apocalyptic nightmare of fictional proportions, they'd tried.

The ring sat in his palm, small and a shiny white gold he'd never really cared for but that had matched Marci's. There had been a sale. A half-the-world-is-gone-and-no-one-in-their-right-mind-is-buying-jewelry sale. He remembered thinking, that was silly. If there was ever a time to get married, it was when you really needed a semblance of stability. Of normality. Life. Hope. Something.

Theo had vanished, and his mom. Three of his cousins and an uncle and his grandma. Karen had been okay, though. Brett, too. His dad and the rest of the family. That was something.

Foggy tried not to think too much about the day it had happened. They'd been working a case. Staying late, trying to piece the argument together. Matt's hand had been on his Braille keyboard but he'd been laughing at a stupid joke Foggy had made. Matt's smile, bright and comfortable and handsome, crinkling the corners of his eyes, had turned to ash in seconds.

Then the screams had started. Chaos, everywhere. Screeching brakes and the slam of metal on metal. There hadn't been time to think, not really, and he'd figured early on it was better to keep it that way.

Remember Matt's smile. Not what came after.

In the days, in the weeks that had followed, he'd helped people as best he could. Tried to keep it together. Tried to do what Matt, what Daredevil, would have done.

Then, three months later, he'd proposed to Marci.

He'd tried to move on.

It just wasn't working, Marci told him a week ago, brisk and blunt as ever. It wasn't anything he was doing wrong, specifically. He just wasn't _there_. Marci had lost people too, but at least she was trying. Was she sad about the divorce? Of course she was. She loved him. But she couldn't stay married to someone who never even seemed to be on the same planet.

She hadn't been wrong.

Foggy hadn't told Marci that he still dreamed about Matt every night. He hadn't told her that he'd kept Matt's costume (hadn't told her about Daredevil at all) or that sometimes he still wandered back to their old office or Matt's building or Josie's or even Columbia and just closed his eyes and remembered the sound of Matt's voice and his smile and the way his fingers had felt wrapped around Foggy's arm as they walked together.

He'd worried so much, and for so long, that Matt was going to get himself killed punching bad guys in his pajamas. He'd never, in a million years, expected to lose Matt to what for all intents and purposes had been a cosmic coin flip. He couldn't tell Marci that either.

Foggy thought about how angry he'd been at Matt all those years ago for keeping secrets of his own, and tears pricked his eyes, blurring everything. It wasn't just the ache of the memory--he was used to that by now. It was how little he'd understood, then. All the time they'd lost when Matt had been living and breathing and here, just because Foggy had felt betrayed.

He understood now what it was to have a secret.

The wedding ring glinted in his palm, and he closed his fingers around it. His world, breaking apart again. He'd thought maybe he'd be numb to something as mundane as a divorce, after everything. What was there left in his soul to rip away? But the truth was, he loved Marci. He couldn't stand to see another thing end.

He sat up straighter on the floral pattern couch where he'd been crashing at Brett's while he and Marci sorted everything out.

For a moment, the ghost of Matt's smile was replaced by the image of Marci's, and something almost like clarity.

Matt wasn't coming back. Marci was here. And Foggy was an idiot.

Losing everything he'd managed to build in a world ravaged by loss, all because for five years he'd been unable to get Matt's damn smile out of his head.

He opened his palm and slipped the ring back on, and tried not to parse out how much of the feeling in his chest was determination and how much was resignation. Maybe he wouldn't be able to fix anything. But he owed it to Marci--he owed it to himself--to try. (He wasn't going to think about what he owed to Matt.) He had been distant. But, he could try to be better. Marci was worth holding onto.

He scrubbed his hands down his face, feeling a day's worth of stubble. It was late. Too late, by any reasonable standard, to call up Marci and ask for another chance. No way she'd still be up.

Still. He hated to go to sleep with something so important unsaid.

He picked up his phone and unlocked it. The background was one of those stock photo cityscapes. _Before_ , it had been him and Matt, Matt grinning with his arm slung around Foggy's shoulders. Karen had taken it at Josie's. He'd changed it to the cityscape the morning of the day he'd asked Marci to marry him.

His last text thread with Marci had ended on, _it's fine, you keep the recliner_.

Foggy dragged in a breath and let it out slowly. Then he typed, _Can we talk?_ And deleted it and tried again, _I'd like to talk. Call me tomorrow._ He hesitated before adding an all-too-formal _Thanks_.

I love you, he wanted to add. He didn't. He pressed send and let his hand drop to his knee. It was time to get some sleep. Marci would call tomorrow, and they'd work it out then. Or not. There was nothing else he could do tonight.

He washed up in Brett's tidy bathroom (Brett was off on patrol, still working overtime as the NYPD struggled to keep up with the demands of the city), then pulled on his pajama pants and t shirt and settled onto the couch with a blanket. He missed his apartment. He missed his bed.

She'd call him tomorrow. He was sure of that.

He drifted off, exhaustion pulling him down, and woke up to the sound of his phone ringing.

Even though the haze of sleep he knew, this was it. He fumbled his phone off the floor and swiped the call bar to pick up, still blinking sleep out of his eyes. If he'd bothered to look at the name past a blurry "Ma--", he might not have been shocked into utter paralysis at the voice on the other end.

"Foggy?" Matt said, an undercurrent of breathy tension and fear in his voice, and Foggy wondered of he was dreaming or hallucinating or maybe both. "Foggy, are you there? I think I, I passed out. In the office. But now you're gone and it's all different and outside I hear--I just need to know you're all right. Fog?"

Foggy opened his mouth and shut it. His eyes had filled with tears and it was only by some miracle he was able to croak out the words, "I'm fine, Matty. Stay there. I'll be right there. Oh, god. I'll be right there."

**Author's Note:**

> I originally posted this as a WIP with a second chapter, but as life has gotten more hectic I've decided to hold off on posting the rest until I actually have time to finish it. (I'm the actual worst when it comes to WIPs and here is your proof.) 
> 
> I thought the prologue this story worked as a standalone story, though, so I'm leaving it up in the meantime. Let me know what you think!


End file.
